Six poems by the Chinese poets Yu Nu and Xiao Shui, and Taiwanese Lee Chin-Wen, translated from Chinese by N. Noéll.

It was mid-April and the snow had already melted by the time my husband and I and our two young children arrived at Our Lady of the Snows, a Trappist monastery in the Ardèche region of southeast France. Along with Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite and my writing journal, I’d packed my ISYM (I’ll-show-you-motherfucker) list all the men I’d ever slept with, save my husband of eleven years. I’d been struggling let go of the list, and now ready, planned to burn it at some point during our stay.

In this interview with recent Barnard College graduate Juliana Clark, Wayétu Moore discusses her transformative debut novel She Would Be King, a retelling of Liberia’s formation story steeped in magical realism. Through this conversation, Moore reveals the intentions behind a number of her narrative and character-based choices and parses out the themes central to this work. Aside from her vocation as a writer, Moore is an educator at the City University of New York’s John Jay College and the founder of One Moore Book, a publisher of educational stories for children whose cultures have been underrepresented in the publishing industry or are from countries with low literacy rates.

Welcome to Blurbed, a new round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed will feature a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

I first read Rebecca Solnit in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the perfect place to read her: San Francisco is a place she currently calls home and the Bay Area has influenced her writing since at least her days as a graduate student in journalism at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. At the behest of my boss, I read her seminal feminist essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” on my work computer. It was from this piece that the term “mansplaining” was spawned, though Solnit herself didn’t coin it. To write an essay which rings true to so many individuals’ experience as to popularize a new word is a feat, and Solnit has already accomplished it.

It was you, wasn’t it, Belmira? I know you can’t hear me, now that you’ve gone someplace far away and there’s no point in thinking you’ll ever come back. I’m alone, I and our secret, and I don’t even know how long I’ll be able to keep it, because the note, forgive me, Bel, I think I left the damn thing at Antonio’s house, I don’t know exactly where, but in that moment of shock, I ended up dropping the envelope in the middle of all that mess and only realized I’d left it behind when I’d already made it out into the street.

The house is endless only in its emptiness, so vast
there seemed trapped the wind itself. And what this woman wants

Poetry and death have always had a close, paradoxical relationship. The death of poetry, the poetry of death, the Dead Poets Society: what are these phrases if not elegant misnomers? Poetry, after all, is so life affirming, so full of beauty and truth, isn’t it? The further we wade into these texts, and the poets behind them, the more we come to realize, suddenly, that poetry cannot save us from our own demise. Almost all poems confront the end, whether explicitly or not. The only remaining question is: how?

Because of my interest in the movie, I went to photography where passion and love brought a different picture of life for me. Cinema is motion pictures and is continuous. Photography is also a unique collection of discrete elements.

What do we do for our own sake? Binge watch all of Westworld in a single weekend, eat an entire box of mac and cheese in one sitting, major in nonfiction? Few of us can say that we are truly productive in these actions. Sure Netflix may be comforting and relaxing, but how good is it for us actually?

Solace is so desperately sought out by youth, but finding tranquility often poses as a challenge. I find the bathroom to be an unusual but common place to collect yourself.

Originally I was strongly inspired by Luca Maria Piccolo’s series of ‘M.U.D Centro Danza’s’ series and then half way through the photo shoot I unintentionally took it into a different direction. There were many poly boards set up as props. Ideally Sarah (dancer) and I were working with how her body movements would compliment the shapes we could make with the boards without being restrictive on her freedom to dance.

A collection of mixed media prints utilizing beadwork and collage, this interweaving of Gray’s Anatomy by Dr. Henry Gray and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a new narrative. Pride and Prejudice is the tale of the cultivation and beginning of romance awash in hope and ending on a note of future promise. Gray’s Anatomy focuses not on this emotional establishment of ties but instead scientific facts and it unveils the mystery behind the creation of the human body and its functions. Through the editing of these texts by means of removal, blocking, and highlighting of words this new work delves within and is instead a study of deterioration. The deterioration of a relationship, deterioration of a text, a deterioration of the image.

Some daughters might have felt uncomfortable talking to their father about masturbation, but I’d grown up hearing about penis envy and the phallic symbol, plus whatever I’d overhear through the closed door of my father’s study.

I depict life as I see it and people as they are. I don’t try to contrive what isn’t, but simply reveal and preserve what is. Photographs of coupling, youth, sexuality, class, & addiction form the locus of my work.

I am fascinated by the way the presence of light can suggest a complex and mysterious interior realm by merely touching the surfaces of people and things. The photographic still seems to stop time or slow time down, like holding one’s breath. My subjects are the familiar, the domestic: myself, my friends, my family at home, in rooms, in cars. These are private lives, private places. The intention of this work is to create photographic portraits that resemble paintings, capturing private moments from a life and intimate scenes of family, home, domestic settings.

From a series of digital photo-collage pieces entitled BOOK OF NO LEDGE. In my dialogue with this encyclopedia (circa 1947), I attempt to marry a bit of poetry with the know-it-all simplifier of the universe, voice. Besides altering the text, I often add other graphic bits and refine to my own purposes all that had been in the vast before.

For the past two years, my writing and research has been examining representations of space and place. A few months ago, I wrote that “places are made by returning”. This photographic place was made by returning many times to the same space – in the rain, in bright sun, at different hours of the day. The result is a representation of a single space that converges with a simultaneity of many times. The one thing holding all these photos together is the one thing not seen in any of them – the central point; the origin.

This is the second collection in my series Holding On, Letting Go. While the first collection emanated from my archive of black and white negatives and photographs, I’ve now turned to art historical paintings as inspiration. In Mother and Child, I’m at once artist; photographer; curator; designer; and (re)interpreter of art history, myth, and iconography. My interest is in exploring this primary archetypal relationship through the ages, by focusing on indelible, formative moments as created by painters. Moments of Holding On and Letting Go.